From Durand to Hoff: The
making of a pioneering Aero/Astro Department

BY BRIAN CANTWELL WITH DAWN
LEVY

The
history of aeronautics at Stanford is almost as old as the
university itself. In 1904, just a year after the Wright Brothers'
powered flight, William F. Durand was recruited from Cornell to
chair Stanford's Mechanical Engineering Department. A former naval
officer and marine engineer, Durand pursued hydraulics engineering
at Stanford, where he consulted on the design of dams including
Hoover, Grand Coulee and Shasta and helped develop the water supply
system that would wet the parched West.

On Jan. 15,
1951, William F. Durand (left) and Elliot Reid packed propellers
for later display at the Smithsonian Institution. The propellers,
whose designs were tested in wind tunnels by Durand and E.P. Lesley
in 1918, improved performance by controlling pitch during flight.
Photo: News Service
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Aeronautics developments prior to World War I compelled Durand
to establish Stanford's first aeronautics course in 1915. The
course was the second (after MIT) to be offered by an American
university.

1915 was also the year the government created NASA's
forerunner, NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics).
Durand became its first civilian chair and helped plan what would
become a famous laboratory at Langley Field, Va. That was also the
year Durand and Everett Parker "Bill" Lesley built the first of
Stanford's three wind tunnels to test propeller designs for the
National Aeronautical Commission. Fifty of the 125 propellers they
tested are now on display in the Engineering Library in the Terman
building.

In
1917 Durand served as scientific attaché to the American
Embassy in Paris, where he helped organize the postwar Inter-allied
Inventions Committee. During this assignment he met Harry
Guggenheim, a young Naval lieutenant and aviation enthusiast. This
friendship would eventually have a profound effect on the
development of aeronautics research and education in the United
States.

Durand retired from academic life in 1924 only to begin one of
the most important chapters in his career. In 1925 he became a
member of President Coolidge's Aircraft Board, which fostered
passage of the basic Civil Aeronautics Act by Congress. In 1926 he
became a trustee of the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of
Aeronautics. (Much of the enthusiasm with which Harry Guggenheim
prevailed on his father to establish this fund came from his
association with Durand.) This fund was used to establish and
support new aeronautics departments throughout the country. At
Stanford, this money enabled appointment of two key faculty: Elliot
Grey Reid, an aerodynamics specialist, and Alfred Salem
Niles, an expert on aircraft structures.

In
1929 Durand began work as editor of the six-volume work
Aerodynamic Theory, completed in 1936 under the sponsorship
of the Guggenheim fund. In 1933 he resigned from NACA, and in 1935
he became chairman of a committee on airships that would recommend
future design practices after the loss of airships Akron off
the New Jersey coast and Macon off the California coast. A
skilled diplomat and eloquent speaker, Durand was much in demand
for national and international committees. He was elected president
of the World Power Congress and at the opening meeting in
Washington in 1936 addressed the delegates in English, then French,
German and Spanish -- all languages he had mastered.

By
1939, 42 Stanford aeronautics graduates were active in the airframe
and airline industry, in the military and in government research.
After World War II, aeronautics activity slumped at Stanford just
as it did in industry. The Guggenheim fund ran out of money in
1939. By the late 1950s, with the retirements of Reid and Niles
approaching and with the number of students down to a trickle of
four or five a year, Dean of Engineering Frederick Terman seriously
considered discontinuing the aeronautics division of Mechanical
Engineering.

When graduates heard this they offered to raise money from the
aircraft industry to save the program. A committee led by John
Buckwalter ('24, Engr. '32) of Douglas Aircraft and Philip Coleman
('34) of Lockheed asked each major western aircraft company to
contribute $5,000 per year for five years to reinvigorate
aeronautics at Stanford and get it back to a position where it
could attract students and research support. Douglas, Boeing,
Convair, Northrop, North American, Hughes and Lockheed all chipped
in.

Durand died in 1958 at the age of 99. His life ended at a time
of resurgence for aeronautics and astronautics. Sputnik, the first
satellite, had launched the Space Age in 1957, and soon afterward
the importance of high-speed flight and space flight would be
widely recognized. A Centennial Conference in honor of Durand in
August 1959 pointed to the emergence of a department with a
substantial student body and research contracts and gave Terman the
evidence he needed to determine that the new department could stand
on its own. In September 1959, the Department of Aeronautics and
Astronautics was formally established as a separate, graduate-only
department with Nicholas Hoff as its first chairman.

The
building that houses most of that department now bears Durand's
name. A memorial there reads: "His first professional assignment in
1880 was on the USS Tennessee, a full rigged wooden ship
with auxiliary steam power. His last, 1942-46 was as chairman of
the National Aeronautical Commission for the development of jet
propulsion for aircraft."